


They're Seventeen and They're In Love

by JackRose



Category: X-Men Evolution
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 10:22:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15839283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackRose/pseuds/JackRose
Summary: In a world with no X-men, Kitty and Lance's story takes a drastically different path.





	They're Seventeen and They're In Love

They’re seventeen and they’re in love. Kitty spent high school trying not to be noticed. She breathed out a sigh of relief every time she passes someone in the hall without making eye contact. Lance walks like he expects the world to get out of his way, if it knows what’s good for it. Kitty spends an hour in the bathroom, trying to duplicate his sneer and snarl in the mirror.

Kitty was only the second thing Lance ever loved. The first was the jeep, which he maintains with a careful mix of stolen parts, elbow grease, affection, duct tape, percussive maintenance and bellowed obscenities. Kitty mostly just gets the affection, despite her occasional attempts to hint that she wouldn’t mind the duct tape.

Lance steals because, from the inside, it’s always been apparent to him that the system is rigged. Kitty steals because the means of production are held by a tiny fraction of the population, and the state is more interested in preserving the status quo than promoting equality.

That’s a damned lie. Kitty steals because Lance does.

Locks and doors were never a problem for her. As she learns, cameras and alarms and laser tripwires become no more than minor inconveniences. For all that she can never match Lance’s sheer disregard for other people’s property (“For rich prep bastard’s property,” he corrects her,) she can soon get in and out of places he never would have attempted.

He worries that now that she’s surpassed him, she’s going to leave him. She tries to explain why that’s ridiculous, what he means to her, but she can’t find the words. Instead she shows him, pulling him into the back of the battered jeep.

Lance teaches her how to fight- how to make a fist, how to fall, how to recognize when you just need to show strength and when you need to hurt someone as badly as you can as quickly as you can, before they fully appreciate what’s happening. Kitty teaches him how to pick his fights. Slowly, their crimes become less about lashing out blindly at society.

They’re eighteen and they’re outlaws. They steal from hate groups and Humanity First think tanks. They steal from the Church of Humanity and the Purifiers. They leave the Genoshan ambassador duct taped in a hotel room bathtub while they rob her blind. They take cash, bearer bonds, credit cards, jewelry. They also take files which Kitty decrypts and uploads to the web while Lance strums a guitar and sings outlaw songs.

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the national security apparatus, a SHIELD file on them grows ever fatter.

They’re nineteen and they’re being hunted. FBI, SHIELD, an alphabet soup of government agencies. Criminal, too- because they draw too much heat, or because they’ve stolen from someone connected.

Kitty calls her father on his birthday, and a pack of Genoshan Magistrates leap out of the phoneline. They’re already pointing guns and shouting for Lance and Kitty to get on their knees with their hands on their heads. Lance throws back his head and laughs as the earth starts to move under his feet. He’s still chuckling later, between slugs of whiskey from the bottle, as Kitty phases the bullet out of his arm.

“Were you scared?” She asks, tightening the bandage.

“Of what?” He says. “I knew you’d be okay. I love your power, Pryde. Nothing can hurt you. Nothing can touch you.”

She purses her lips and refrains from telling him how it scared her to see him bleeding. Later that night, mad on whiskey and adrenaline, he tells her that if it comes to it, he’ll go to jail for the both of them- she’s to turn state’s evidence and claim he abducted her. She doesn’t argue the point, but a week later she has his name tattooed across her slender back.

He smirks when she shows him, and shakes his head and a few days later has hers inked across his chest.

But mostly, it’s sweet jobs and songs blasted on the jeep’s radio as they fly down night’s highways, and laughing about how slow and dim and hopeless all the enemies pursuing them are. They’re eighteen, and they’re going to live forever.

They’re twenty, and the walls are closing in. They double cross a New York City crime boss, and, not long after, the jeep explodes as Lance goes to start it. Kitty barely grabs him in time, phases them both down and through the concrete, so the ground shields them from the blast. They steal cars, after that, but they never keep them long. Lance can’t bear to replace the jeep even though, like the Ship of Theseus, it had long since lost its last original part.

Other times, they don’t get off so lightly. A job goes wrong and Lance winds up leaping from a third story window. His leg never quite heals right, and he walks with a limp now. Worse- Kitty’s caught, a vibranium cuff that she can’t phase through, can’t phase with her, and she has to beg Lance to cut her hand off. He hesitates until she tells him that otherwise she’ll have to do it herself, then grits his teeth and does what he has to.

Kitty never quite stops having nightmares about the cold, dense, wrongness of the cuff. Lance never quite stops having nightmares about the sound Kitty made around the belt he’d given her to bite down on.

Emma Frost finds them not long after that, dressed all in white as if she was the angel in this story. She tells them that she has plans for the mutant situation in the US that don’t involve them riding about raising Cain. She tells them about what’s really going on in Genosha, horrors that even Kitty, flipping through all her stolen files, even Lance with all his cynicism, hadn’t guessed at. Then she makes them an offer.

They’re twenty-four, and they’re rebels. Four years ago a plane landed at a hidden airstrip maintained by Genoshan freedom fighters. It carried guns, munitions, supplies, cash, and a dozen mutants ready to give their lives for a worthy cause.

Nine of them have gotten that wish. Lance and Kitty remain, as does the blue-furred teleporter, whose laugh and swashbuckling antics make him seem invincible, like a star from an old black and white film, where you knew the villain would be vanquished before the lights went up again.

They’ve learned a lot over the years. Kitty has learned to be still, standing almost completely inside a tree or a boulder or a wall, just barely able to draw breath from beyond it, until it’s time to step out and carry hell to some poor army patrol or Magistrate.

Lance isn’t ever still, but he’s a lot quieter than he used to be. His skin has become a testament, lines and lines of names with dates next to them. Fallen comrades. Set apart on his right bicep are the GPS coordinates of the camps they’ve liberated. He and Kitty never talk about what they found in those camps, but the nightmares about the cuffs now come as almost a relief. Later, Kitty will talk about it with a therapist, with her students, with Rachel, but as far as she can tell, Lance only ever talks about it once, at the Genegineer’s trial, years later.

They’re twenty-six, and they’re heroes. All the mutants are freed, all the citadels have fallen. Kitty dedicates herself to winning the peace- she blunts two attempted coups, facilitates a third, campaigns tirelessly for democracy, for a minimum income, to prevent reprisals against the human populace of Genosha.

Lance is out of the habit of not being at war. He hunts Magistrate holdouts in the jungles and highlands. When he runs out of die-hards, he looks further abroad. There were those in the Genoshan government who saw the writing on the wall and fled before the rebels took the capital. The new government is in the process of negotiating extradition treaties, but Lance has never been a patient man, and treaties and borders mean nothing against the rows of names and dates and coordinates emblazoned on his skin.

He gathers the likeminded around him and they swear oaths of Brotherhood and vengeance. He never asks Kitty to join them, although even he would have trouble saying whether this was out of fear that she’d refuse- or that she’d agree.

Kitty applies the lessons of stillness to the government. She never holds office, rarely gives speeches, doesn’t chase influence or curry favor, but the good and great in the New Genoshan Republic come to her for advice.

She accepts a teaching position at the Genoshan Free University. Her class has no syllabus, is not technically worth any credits towards graduation, but it always has a wait list. An unusual percentage of her students find work in the government, in the Foreign Ministry, in the Intelligence Services.

Lance’s Brotherhood brings home some war criminals in chains. Others are found dead of a variety of exotic and unlikely causes, or simply drop off the face of the Earth, never to be heard from again. Those who flee before him make new alliances, fan the flames of hate in a dozen corners of the globe, so it seems that Lance will never have to face the prospect of a future with no enemy to rail against.

They try to abduct Kitty once, for leverage against him, moving on her during a rare visit to Belgium. Kitty still remembers the lessons of the revolution, and it’s a long time before anyone suggests that particular stratagem again.

One day, when Lance comes to visit Kitty, he brings Rachel with him. Rachel’s an enigma- she turned up one day in Genosha, claiming to be the daughter of two of the most famous American mutants of the century- despite the fact that that Phoenix has been dead longer than she’s been alive, and, as far anyone knew, had never met the serious young man who’s just then becoming New York State’s first mutant attorney general- although oddly enough, it’s second blind one.

Confronted with these facts, Rachel just shrugs and says “It was another time.” And, since she’s all bottled rage and lean muscle in leather and spikes, folks are rarely inspired to press the point. Now she’s part of Lance’s Brotherhood, and preaching the gospel of the Phoenix on the side- that death is not the end, but just a transmutation of the soul to celestial fire.

Neither Lance nor Kitty is especially religiously minded- though Kitty attends temple a few times a year, and feels a twinge of guilt when her father complains about her tattoo, reminding her that she was created b’tzelem Elokim. Nevertheless, they spend a long weekend talking about faith and fate, about consciousness and death, and about the Universal Love of the Phoenix.

It transpires that Rachel has some fairly specific applications of the Universal Love in mind, and what with one thing or another, when Lance leaves to follow a rumor of a Church of Humanity splinter in Latveria, Rachel remains behind with Kitty, as she does on and off through the years that follow.

Then, because even Lance can only spit in the devil’s eyes so many times without consequences, he dies in a Purifier ambush.

Kitty is thirty-five, and Lance is dead. Remembering the power of stillness, she sits, stonefaced through his funeral, and then invites a few of the old students who flocked to comfort her, and a few of the warriors who came to honor their fallen brother, to join her for tea afterwards. None of Lance’s killers live out the year.

She never meets anyone who makes her feel quite the way Lance did- though Rachel is a miracle of support, though academics and novelists will spend decades arguing over the exact nature of her relationship with Kurt Wagner, of the content of the letters between her and Emma Frost, though Illyana (whose history is, if possible, even less plausible than Rachel’s) smirks and snarls with even more sincerity.

Kitty is fifty and Lance is dead. She’s retired, now, officially, though each new head of the Genoshan Intelligence Services makes a pilgrimage to see her.

Kitty is sixty and Lance is dead.

Kitty is seventy and Lance is dead.

Kitty is eighty and Lance is dead.

Kitty is eighty-seven, and Lance is dead. Rachel- who goes by Mother Askani now, who counts almost a tenth of the world among her followers- is by her side, holding her hand and telling her that Lance is waiting, that the world beyond is all love and fire and everyone you lost waiting to welcome you home. Kitty’s isn’t terribly worried about her own rebirth- she’s lived to see the world’s, as much by her own hand as any other. 

Kitty is dead. And Lance is dead. And the story is over.


End file.
